Building Drupal with Reusable Fields

CCK and Field API

CCK is the most useful module for Drupal. It adds custom fields and content types to Drupal. Drupal 7 incorporates the community efforts of CCK into the core as the Field API.

The CCK module allows a content type to have multiple fields with various field types and different field widgets and formatters. A field must be assigned a widget to define its input style and at least one formatter to define its display style. The UML diagram above describes the relationship between content types, fields, field widgets, and field formatters in creating a CCK type.

Reuse Fields

When a CCK field is added to a content type for the first time, this CCK field’s is created in Drupal as a class and an instance is assigned to the given content type. When the field is assigned to a content type, its configuration parameters are stored in the instance instead of the class. Instead of adding new fields to a content type, adding existing fields is a better option to reduce the system’s complexity and to improve scalability.

Adding an existing field only requires the administrator to choose a field from a list of fields defined in other content types and select a widget to define the input style. The most recently created field instance brings in the default parameters that can be changed later.

Reuse Fields with the API

CCK allows adding customized fields, widgets, and formatters in modules. Many third-party modules (Drupal CCK modules list) are already created to accomplish different tasks, including images, videos, and other internal and external references. CCK for Drupal 6 provides a set of API (CCK Developer Documentation for Drupal 6) for module developers. Drupal 7 provides native Field API for module developers.

Performance Issues

CCK (or Field API in Drupal 7) adds extra complexity to a Drupal system. When creating a new field, the field’s definition is added to the field class table and the field’s configuration is added to the field instance table; meanwhile, a new table is added to the Drupal database to store the field data. Database tables add complexity to the system. In addition, queries of nodes will incur JOIN expressions of tables to field data. Multiple JOINs will impact database performance since MySQL responds poorly to queries with multiple JOINs of tables if not properly configured.
Reuse of fields can reduce the number of tables in the Drupal database. For example, if 10 image fields, field_image_a, field_image_b, …, field_image_j, are added to the system, 10 tables are added to the database. If a single content type only utilizes two image fields, one thumbnail and one image, we can redefine the fields as field_image_thumbnail and field_image. Only two tables are introduced to the database with the latter configuration.
Reuse of fields can also reduce the system’s complexity. Instead of creating and maintaining 10 different fields, Drupal admins maintain only two fields and their documentation. Database administrators only need to improve performance of two extra tables. KISS is always a good principle.